CENTRESTAGE: Mulayam

Suddenly, as psephology joins numerology to steal the shine from the slogans that have taken India for granted, one diminutive man, he in his starched dhoti-kurta, his brow beaten to deep furrows by the merciless politics of the heartland, begins to shine. The resident of 5 Kalidas Marg in Lucknow, for so long a wrestler in search of a ring larger than Uttar Pradesh, after round two of E-2004, finds himself at the centre of Indian politics, challenging his own fighter's instinct to make use of an impending irony: how to emerge a winner in the possible aftermath of a draw between bigger fighters.

Mulayam Singh Yadav, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and leader of the Samajwadi Party (SP), the self-proclaimed Rashtriya Adhyaksh (national president) is fast realising that the distance between Lucknow and Delhi is shrinking, that his day, after so many horrible yesterdays, is closer: the Adhyaksh may at last gain his Rashtra. Or, no Adhyaksh can rule this Rashtra without his mandate. Future, or the day after May 13, is likely to be indebted to the man who travelled from the remoteness of Saifai, a village in Etawah, Uttar Pradesh, to reach where he is today, as arbiter and aspirant, a first-name familiarity in the political calculus of India.

So don't write off the scenarios. Mulayam as the Monarch of May, or the next after the Monarch. Mulayam as deputy prime minister in an NDA government. Or Mulayam as deputy prime minister in a Congress government. Or prime minister Mulayam Singh Yadav-how does it sound? Possible, for India has seen bigger burlesques. Remember those transit prime ministers, accidental rulers born out of situations when confusion was the mother of consensus-Charan Singh, H.D. Deve Gowda, Chandra Shekhar? They didn't have the mandate of the nation. Rather, they were beneficiaries of squandered mandate-or of democratic con. And their ephemeral raj was blissfully independent of any ruling philosophy. It was the realisation of a private fantasy on the national account. Well, Mulayam has history to fall back on. More than history Amar Singh perhaps.

He is the urban Sancho Panza to Mulayam's rural Quixote. The portly Thakur is more than the general secretary of the party. He has repackaged the rustic socialist as a political socialite-breakfast with Sahara's Subrata Roy, lunch with Amitabh Bachchan, tea with the Ambanis, dinner with Infosys' Nandan Nilekani, and maybe talking weather with Aishwarya Rai in between. Singh gives the soundbites (see box) and does the networking as his leader, the dhartiputra Yadav, reaches out to the shirtless of Uttar Pradesh in a blue-and-white chopper, addressing eight rallies a day. He is the voice of Mulayam's mind. He provides a national spread to Mulayam's provincial mind. The spinmeister-cum-image builder too thinks the master's day has come.

And what makes him the man of the moment is not the SP tally alone. It is the context. It is his state Uttar Pradesh, the veto land, the historical arbiter of Delhi. Seven of the 10 prime ministers had come from this state, which accounts for 80 of the 543 Lok Sabha seats. Stability rhymes with Uttar Pradesh, whose electoral attitude will not only decide the next prime minister but the very trajectory of India as a nation. So many fates, most poignantly of India's most popular politician's, are subordinated to the whims of Uttar Pradesh, which today rhymes with Mulayam. As national parties-which are now contesting less seats, 375 of the total 543 seats this year-yielded ground, Mulayam built on it.

Then comes the question, existential as well as ideological: who is Mulayam Singh Yadav? True, as every profile writer is never tired of saying, he is not all that mulayam, or soft, at the core. As someone who has learned his lessons-in Hindi of course-in the harsh hinterlands of Indian politics, where revenge and retribution are the reigning morality, he can't afford to be otherwise. A Lohiaite, that political idealist whose anti-Congressism is accentuated by caste, Mulayam sees himself as a socialist whose time has come. Time to extend the borders of a rural Ruritania that exists only in Lohiaite hallucinations beyond Uttar Pradesh to the heart of Indraprastha. In realpolitik, though, Charan Singh, the First Farmer of Indian politics, father of the caste cocktail called ajgar (Ahir, Jat, Gujjar and Rajput), was his patron, who fondly called his protégé chhotte kad ka admi (the short fellow). Mulayam grew taller as he began his political picaresque through the labyrinth of the politics of social justice, living along the way some heartbreaking moments, some heartwarming highs and acquiring a few epithets.

Most memorably Maulana Mulayam, the adjective a popular tribute to the defender of secular faith, which in practice meant the apostle of Muslim ghettos. As the gatekeeper of the now defunct Babri Majid, Mulayam, during his first term as the Janata Dal chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, was the poster devil of Hindutva. Today, he is the poster face of the Third Option-the non-BJP, non-Congress alternative.

SOCIALITE SPINMASTER: Amar Singh (left) is SP's image builder

However, it must be said, he had intimate affairs with both parties in defining stages of his evolution as a politician whose convictions-sorry, Mr Lohia-are conditioned by the convenience of the moment. He survived as chief minister with Congress support in 1990 after the fall of V.P. Singh in Delhi. In retrospect, that was a covenant with the conspirator. Before the Congress could pull the rug from under his feet, he resigned. He would have his revenge in 1999 when he refused to back Sonia Gandhi as prime minister. Amar Singh, as usual, was there to make the master's revenge sweeter. Mulayam has all along been waiting for the next coming of the prime minister India has missed in that dawn of hidden knives.

How can he forget, and how long can he wait? It was in 1997, when Gowda, who was more of the chief minister of India than the prime minister, fell after the Congress withdrew support. Mulayam was the defence minister then, a post that introduced him to the world beyond Etawah and Lucknow, a world that gave him a gun salute as he descended from an IAF jet. G.K. Moopanar or Mulayam-that was the question, and the Left, represented by the supreme apparatchik of the CPI(M), Harkishen Singh Surjeet, was in favour of Mulayam. V.P. Singh didn't want him; one death and an overseas journey sealed Mulayam's fate. When kingmakers like Gowda and Laloo Prasad Yadav returned from Bhubaneswar after Biju Patnaik's cremation, Mulayam had lost his dream. And Surjeet, his only backer, had already taken an early morning flight to Moscow. I.K. Gujral emerged from nowhere to become one of the luckiest politicians in India. Can Mulayam forget? Can he trust anything except his instincts.

The enemy is always out there, and the fighter can't loosen the vigil. Today, most obviously, the enemy has two names. First, the other Yadav, another Lohiaite, who is also the kitsch master of social justice. It is an internal battle in Yaduvansh, and the warriors are old comrades. The difference is only in style, and both can't afford a Congress revival in their states. Laloo killed the Congress in Bihar by being a friend of the Congress, which could get only four seats. The danger a non-Congress leader like Mulayam faces in Uttar Pradesh is bigger. For, in the vintage Congress, every social or communal specimen, now sought after by Mulayam and other social salvation peddlers, had its place. So a Congress redux means the SP losing its hard-won constituencies. The other enemy has the name Mayawati. The sociology of the Mulayam-Mayawati clash is subordinated to their personal history of hate and revenge. They are two incompatible faces of the politics of social justice.

The prospect of Mulayam as a rural revolutionary in Delhi has already spawned fear in the marketplace as well as in the popular mind. The stockmarket crash by 213 points on April 27 was a good indicator of the exit-polls-generated fear of "After Vajpayee Who?" It is not only the aspirant's big corporate connections that evoke fear. Is he going to rule India with the efficiency and world view of a panchayat president? Does he have an economic policy? Take a second look at the transit premiers and you realise how discredited they were without a national mandate, and how remote they were from ideas. More pertinently, how is the wannabe going to deal with the legacy of Vajpayee, who has brought a new coalition dharma to Indian politics, a redeeming cultural shift after the Congress century? "All leaders are busy impressing the voters by presenting themselves as prospective prime ministers. It is time for you to judge who really is capable of providing a stable government," said the prime minister at an election rally, as if he was reading the mind of those who have a stake in a nation that at last has found its place in the world where power is measured by national as well as economic confidence.

No transit prime minister in the past could ensure national stability. They never built nations, they divided it, socially. Even Sonia on the stump is debunking the newly found romance of the small parties, Mulayam's post-election allies.

When small leaders are prompted to think big by psephologists, a phantom rises from Delhi: another chief minister of India. A phantom nevertheless.

-with Farzand Ahmed